This Republican State Senator is Trying to Clean Up the Failed Kansas Tax Experiment

We all know the story by now. In 2012, with Republican Gov. Sam Brownback at the helm, Kansas enacted massive state-wide tax cuts. Proponents of supply-side economics insisted that these tax cuts would not only pay for themselves, but would also spur massive economic growth in the state. Brownback said the tax cuts would be “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” He promised that they’d boost investment and increase employment; and he swore they’d “directly benefit our schools and local governments.”

Instead, over the next few years, the tax cuts wrought havoc on the state’s economy and funding for schools, health care, and other priorities. The state’s economy slowed down, their credit rating was reduced, and job creation underperformed nearly every neighboring state as well as the national average. Now, Despite Governor Brownback’s failed “real-life experiment” and dire warnings from Kansas legislators, Congressional Republicans are planning to apply an eerily similar proposal nationwide.

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Jeremy spoke with Kansas State Sen. Dinah Sykes, a lifelong Republican who successfully ran for the Kansas Senate on a platform of repealing Gov. Brownback’s tax cuts after seeing what happened to her kids’ public schools.

Jeremy Slevin: So, you are a Republican—you voted for Sam Brownback when he first ran for governor, but you ended up running for your seat on a slightly different platform. Do you want to talk about how you got involved in running for office?

Sen. Dinah Sykes: I was involved in my children’s school as PTA president, and I started seeing the PTA foot the bill for a lot of things. Helping more with field trips, buying books for the library, and things like that. The classes were getting larger so it made me start asking more questions—going to school board meetings, talking to my representative. I realized that it was more of a state issue with the way that the funds were coming in, so I got involved.

Regardless of whether you agree with someone or not, you should be able to have a dialogue with them.

At the time I lived in a different section of Kansas, and when I moved just a few miles it changed my representative and my senator. I tried to open a dialogue with them as well, but I was not listened to because I had a different opinion from them. Before, I was able to talk to my Republican representative—regardless of whether you agree with someone or not, you should be able to have a dialogue with them. So, I was frustrated trying to figure out what to do next. I didn’t know if I should try to find a good candidate to get behind or start with the school board or what, and doors seemed to open and open and so I finally decided to run for the Senate seat.

JS: And at some point, Gov. Brownback and the legislators passed major tax cuts for businesses and a lot of wealthy folks in the state. How did that play a role in the schools and your decision to run?

DS: In 2012, the tax plan created a loophole for businesses so that if they were an LLC, they were not taxed on pass-through income. We also had three tax brackets and we went down to two.

It did not work. We had nine rounds of budget cuts. Borrowed $2 billion from our highway fund. Now I’m all for bonding that money when it’s building infrastructure, but that’s not what it was used for. It was there to bridge the gap and to try to do a sales tax increase. Meanwhile, class sizes were large and my school had not bought library books for five years. And we were seeing that the core function of government was not able to work properly.

JS: Was it tough to challenge someone in your own party?

DS: Yeah it was challenging, and you’re going against an incumbent that’s sitting on a pot of money. For me, someone who is new to this, I was just making sure I built those relationships with local leaders and my chambers of commerce, and talked to my neighbors. It really was a grassroots thing, trying to get the everyday Kansan more involved.

I think honestly that the everyday Kansan and the everyday American want people to work together. And it’s not, “I have this great idea and everyone needs to come on board with me,” it’s, “How do we work together?” and “I have this point of view and you have a different point of view and how do we come together and compromise?” Compromise has become such a negative word in politics, but that is how good policy is made.

JS: The reason we are talking about this today is that the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are considering similar legislation that goes a step further from what Kansas does. What words of wisdom would you give to your colleagues in Washington who are considering this tax bill?

DS: There are differences between the federal plan and Kansas plan. When the Kansas plan was first brought on the Senate floor, the plan had pay-fors in it, and I’m seeing some of that with the federal plan. But my biggest caution is to let the process work properly. Work both sides of the aisle, come together, have the committee sessions where you vet things. Don’t look for just the

dynamic scoringDynamic scoring analyzes the bugetary impact of major legislation under different possible economic outcomes.

or whatever that’s just going to paint your picture. Look at both sides and have those conversations. At the end of the day, make the hard choice and look at what is really in the best interest of our people.

Compromise has become such a negative word in politics, but that is how good policy is made.

JS: Are you worried that, similarly to how Kansas faced budget cuts following the tax cuts, the same thing could happen at the federal level? I think currently the federal bill costs about $1.5 trillion, not factoring in dynamic scoring as you mentioned.

DS: It is a concern, and I am going to try to stay optimistic and have faith that as more and more people are coming out and wanting to pass good tax reform, that we don’t short-change the process. That we do look at all sides and come up with a good plan.

JS: And going to back to what happened in Kansas, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We should mention that after you got elected you guys went about repealing some of these tax cuts.

DS: Yes, in the end of our session we did pass a bipartisan bill. That took us back, it got rid of the loophole for LLCs, so businesses are back on the tax roll. It increased income rates for all Kansans and we added back in the third tier on our tax plan. It was painful and a lot of compromise. Like I said, I think that’s when you make good policy: When you work together, both parties. We were writing on a white board, “What are things you want to see?” “How do we establish this?”

And at the end of the day we had to come up with an override because our governor did veto it. But we had conservatives with roles as well as moderates, and we all came together and passed the plan.

JS: And how has that affected the budget cuts? Have you seen a return to funding in the schools or is that going to take some time?

DS: It will take some time. We did put more money in and we are still in litigation with the Supreme Court on our school funding. We were able to give pay raises to state employees who have not received pay raises in 8 to 10 years. We are seeing our revenues increase monthly, but you know it’s caution. And we didn’t get in the hole that we are in overnight and we are not going to get out of it overnight.

JS: Thank you so much, senator, we really appreciate you taking the time. Hopefully, members at the national level can learn some of the lessons from what happened in Kansas.

DS: Alright, thank you.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on November 10. It was edited for length and clarity.

The Quiet Attacks on Your Rights You Probably Haven’t Heard About

Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a plan to repeal Obama-era net neutrality rules. Their proposal would allow internet service providers to charge consumers more for higher streaming speeds or for access to certain websites, effectively opening a legal route to deny people access to a free and open internet based on their ability to pay. This came just a week after the FCC voted to roll back Lifeline, a program that helps low-income Americans pay for phone and broadband service.

The FCC’s actions are the latest in a year-long assault on low-income Americans. They come at a time when Senate Republicans are trying to pass a tax bill that would strip health coverage from 13 million Americans and eliminate dozens of federal programs that support low-income families—including protection for crime victims, food for the elderly, and affordable housing—to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

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But those are just the headline battles. There is a quieter war being waged in the trenches: in state legislatures and federal courts, in congressional committees and governors’ mansions, and—as with the FCC’s recent decisions—in federal agencies.

Here’s a brief recap of what this war has looked like in just the past few months.

The administration is legalizing discrimination

While the ADA Education and Reform Act has been quietly making its way through Congress, threatening to undo decades of progress for people with disabilities, two separate agencies have undertaken actions of their own to repeal even more protections. The Department of Transportation yielded to pressure from airline industry lobbyists and delayed implementation of an Obama-era rule designed to prevent airports from routinely losing or breaking wheelchairs and other equipment that belongs to disabled passengers. And last month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded 72 guidance documents that help schools enforce protections for students with disabilities. The revoked guidelines include a policy that helps students with disabilities get federal financial assistance and guidance for states on how to meet the needs of students with hearing loss.

The courts are chipping away at civil rights, too. Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, could cast the deciding vote in a case from a business owner who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. If his appeal is successful, it could allow business owners to use their religious beliefs to deny service to customers on the basis of their sexual orientation, or even other protected identities such as race, religion, or national origin. This would hit low-income residents of rural communities particularly hard, who might not have other businesses they can turn to if they’re denied service (research shows they won’t).

Trump is also stacking lower courts with anti-worker judges: He appointed Thomas Farr, a lawyer who has defended voter suppression and built his career undermining workers’ rights, to a district court in North Carolina. Perhaps more frightening, he appointed Don Willett to the 5th Circuit—a pro-corporate judge who voted to give himself the authority to strike down regulations that “interfere with the free market.”

Federal agencies are chewing giant holes in the safety net

The Department of Health and Human Services is encouraging states to adopt work requirements for Medicaid, which would punish unemployed workers for not being able to find a job by taking away their health care. This continues the administration’s trend of using work requirements to gut safety net programs, after Trump’s presidential budget proposed work requirements to help pay for $193 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

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Work Requirements

Work requirements place strict time limits on certain public assistance programs if the recipients are unable to work.

What are work requirements?

Work requirements place strict time limits on certain public assistance programs if the recipients are unable to work. If the recipient does not complete a minimum number of hours (usually 20) of “work-related activities,” their benefits will be terminated or significantly reduced.

Only certain activities count as work-related activities, but typically employment and community service are on that list. Time spent on longer-term work preparedness, like education or job skills training, usually do not count towards basic requirements.

Work requirements rose to prominence during 1996 welfare reform, when the guarantee of income assistance for poor families with children was replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a block grant that implemented harsh restrictions and time limits. As a result, TANF (commonly known as welfare) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) are the most prominent examples of public assistance programs with work requirements. However, proposals to expand SNAP work requirements and add work requirements to Medicaid and various rental assistance programs have been getting more traction.

Isn’t it good to require people to work?

Most people on public benefits programsalreadywork, or are looking for work. The trouble is, sometimes people can’t find jobs or are unable to work, and work requirements kick them off their benefits when they need them most without doing much to help them join the workforce.

Medicaid is a great example of this. Most people on Medicaid already work, and most of the people who aren’t working report that they’re primary caregivers to family members, have temporary health problems themselves, or are disabled. Others face labor market disadvantages—like low educational attainment or a criminal record—that make it difficult to find a job. The suggestion that people need work requirements to motivate them when they actually need health care, home care, education, or legal help is really misguided.

So what’s an example of work requirements?

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps—has had work requirements since 1996. That’s when certain adults not raising minor children became subjected to a harsh three-month time limit on food assistance unless they are working or participating in qualifying work activities for at least 20 hours per week. It’s important to note that the law doesn’t require states to provide these jobs or jobs training slots (and the majority of them do not). States are permitted to waive the time limits in areas of high unemployment, and most did so in the years that followed the Great Recession.

Recently there’s been a renewed effort among Republican policymakers to reinstate—and ramp up—SNAP’s work requirements. In 2016, they were in effect in 40 states, 22 of which implemented them for the first time since the Great Recession—even in areas of high unemployment. More than 500,000 adults were expected to lose benefits as a result.

What’s more, the Trump administration has proposed restricting these time-limit waivers to areas with unemployment rates greater than 10 percent—that is, peak unemployment during the Great Recession. Some of the areas that would lose waivers include parts of Appalachia, the Navajo Nation in Arizona, and southern Alaska. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that, under this proposal, fully 1 million unemployed adults without dependents would lose access to SNAP in a given month.

What other programs have been targeted for work requirements?

In addition to efforts that would harshen SNAP’s time limits, there are various proposals to attach work requirements to Medicaid. Earlier this year, senior officials from the Trump Administration, including former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price and Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Seema Verma invited states to apply for waivers that would allow them to experiment with work requirements at the state-level. Separate legislation has been introduced in the Senate to require work requirements nationally, and the House of Representative’s proposed 2018 budget seeks work requirements for Medicaid recipients as well. The proposals vary, but the basic concept is the same—to require able-bodied adult Medicaid recipients (typically ages 19 to 64) to engage in work-related activities for a set number of hours a week as a condition of receipt, with few exceptions.

Other programs targeted for work requirements include various rental assistance programs—namely Section 8 Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance, and the Public Housing program. In 2016, as part of the agenda that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s outlined to overhaul public assistance programs, he proposed that rental assistance programs align with TANF benefits—and that residents thus be subject to the same work requirements. In President Trump’s proposed budget for 2018, he indicated that his administration would look to add work requirements to rental assistance programs in the coming years.

Do work requirements increase employment rates?

The results are mixed, but the best-studied example of work requirements suggests that any gains in employment rates are small and short-lived. That’s largely because they push people into low-paying and, ultimately, unsustainable jobs. In the case of TANF, initial boosts in employment were explained in large part by the strength of the labor market at the time that work requirements were implemented. But within five years, those gains had largely disappeared, and the TANF recipients subjected to work requirements did not see improved long-term employment outcomes. Instead, what happened was that people who were unable to work—due to, for example, health problems or labor market disadvantages—were unceremoniously cut off of income assistance, and many were pushed deeper into poverty.

Days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, FEMA was already coordinating the recovery, setting up supplies and personnel. But Trump’s administration was extremely slow to help citizens in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico recover from Hurricanes Maria and Irma, withholding aid until after the hurricanes made landfall. More than 20 percent of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to clean drinking water, more than half the territory doesn’t have access to electricity, and 60 percent of U.S. Virgin Islands residents are still without electricity. (If the House budget passes, things will only get worse: The budget cuts nearly $1 billion from disaster relief to help pay for Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall.)

And, as expected, Trump has ramped up deportations—even from the historic highs taking place during the Obama administration. The United States has deported 34 percent more immigrants so far this year than in the same period last year. For many immigrants fleeing violence and instability in Latin America, deportation means a return to poverty, or worse.

Jeff Sessions gets a section all to himself

Earlier this summer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions strengthened the federal government’s ability to seize assets from people before bringing any criminal charges against them. In other words, this lets police officers take people’s money and property without due process. One more time: This lets police officers take people’s money and property without due process.

Sessions also declared that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act will no longer provide employment protection to transgender Americans, potentially allowing employers and insurers to deny coverage to a group that already experiences extremely high rates of poverty. This came after Sessions’ Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that Title VII also doesn’t cover sexual orientation—opening the door to more workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people. Other guidance from the DOJ on religious liberty could mean more discrimination in other areas of life as well, including discrimination in programs that low-income communities rely on for their health, safety, and security.

What the Final Moments of Homeless People Can Teach Us

The places where many chronically homeless people spend their final moments are somehow shocking in their banality. They are public spaces we pass on the way to somewhere else: a parking lot, a dirt path, an embankment behind a high school. These are the exact locations, respectively, of where Alberto Gonzalez, Kenneth Baker and Rachael Mae Lane (in full-term pregnancy), died in Orange County, California, in 2015 and 2016. (The photo above captures the place—Huntington Beach State Park—where 29-year-old Rafael Estrada Sanabria drowned in the Pacific last year with methamphetamine and alcohol in his system.)

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Such ordinary places tell extraordinary stories of a health crisis and premature mortality amid surging death rates. In affluent Orange County, homeless deaths rose 74 percent in 2015 from the year before, reaching 188. Last year saw the toll rise to 201. Similarly, the homeless death count has risen in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Clara, and San Diego counties in recent years.

A significant contributor to the increase is drug overdose, which has replaced HIV as the primary homeless epidemic, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But another explanation is the historically unprecedented graying of our homeless population. Half of the nation’s chronically homeless are now over 50, and they suffer from accelerated aging—dying of ordinary conditions such as heart disease and cancer as many as 25 years earlier than the rest of us.

“Fifty is the new 75,” says Dr. Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco, who studies homeless health and regularly treats middle-aged people for advanced geriatric illnesses.

With homeless life expectancy ranging between 42 and 52, and so many rounding this milestone, the time for meaningful intervention is fast disappearing. It’s thus more crucial than ever to shine a light on homeless people’s health, lack of medical care, and the circumstances of their deaths.

The following 10 images offer unusually intimate, eerie portraits of the places, though not necessarily the exact spots, where homeless people spent their final moments in Orange County in 2015 and 2016.

PEDRO SAJCHE CHAN, 31

He died after jumping from the First Street Bridge to the Santa Ana riverbed, a partially paved waterway connecting inland counties and the coast. Chan is one of eight people in 2015–2016 to die near the river, where the homeless population has mushroomed to as high as 500 people. Paul Leon, the CEO of the Illumination Foundation, a homeless assistance organization, remembers working the riverbed as a public health nurse more than a decade ago, when there were only a dozen people there. Now, Leon says, “You have a core of about 150 chronically homeless individuals. They’re the anchors.” Placing them in permanent housing will disperse the gatherings, he adds, and “the sooner you start that ball rolling, the better.”

JESSE CARRASCO, 54

He died in front of One Ice House in Santa Ana, a dry ice supplier. Carrasco was the victim of heart disease, though he also had a brain injury. He was one of the regulars who at the time slept along the business-lined street where his body was found. After his death, neighborhood workers paid tribute with candles and flowers. Sidewalks are among the everyday places in which chronically homeless people die—unlike the 80 percent of Americans who spend their final moments in hospitals and nursing homes. Other Orange County death sites in 2015 included a storm drain, a Taco Bell, the Pacific Ocean, a bus terminal, and motels. About a third of the deceased homeless people that year died in a medical facility.

RACHAEL MAE LANE, 33

She was discovered on an embankment behind San Clemente High School’s sports fields. Pregnant and at full-term, Lane died from complications of a ruptured uterus. “In the developed world? My goodness,” says Dr. Kushel. “Women dying of uterine rupture is pretty uncommon if they are getting regular health care. That’s one of the things that an OB-GYN would watch for.” Lane was originally from Appalachia, Virginia, which has a population of under 2,000. Her funeral home obituary says she was survived by three children but preceded in death by two. The infant discovered upon her death, Callie Victoria Snodgrass, was referred to in the obituary as Lane’s “unborn angel.”

LEROY JONES, 93

He was the oldest homeless person to die in Orange County in 2015, passing away in a Cypress motel from an enlarged heart and emphysema. Jones is an outlier among homeless people, whose life expectancy is far shorter than that of the general population. “Not a lot are making it past 65,” says Boston physician Travis Baggett, who treats homeless patients and researches their health. Those like Jones who live longer might offer clues to longevity for the rest of us. “The oldest homeless people are hardy survivors. They are special, different in some way.” It’s unclear if Jones’ emphysema was a result of smoking, though smoking is often a cause. Baggett calls tobacco the “overlooked addiction” among homeless people, who smoke at rates three times higher than the general population.

JERRY BODINE, 64

He died on a walkway in front of the First Methodist Church in Santa Ana, the victim of heroin and alprazolam intoxication, the latter drug often going by its brand name, Xanax, which is commonly used to treat anxiety. Medical trends across the general U.S. population, such as increased opioid abuse and reduced white male life expectancy, appeared first among homeless people, and studying death among the homeless can yield insights into the health trends of the population at large. “I have always considered the homeless to be canaries in the coal mine of public health,” explains the Boston physician Travis Baggett, who studies homeless health issues. “Life expectancy has gone down for white men for the first time ever. We saw that here. Drug overdose, we saw that here. You hold a magnifying glass up to a problem and see it earlier and more dramatically in the homeless population.”

DEREK PETER, 46

He committed suicide by hanging himself from the Balboa Pier in Newport Beach, in late 2015. His former wife, Abigail Lanin Eaves, remembers him as a tormented man who began to show signs of being bipolar just after their honeymoon in 1996. They soon after separated and divorced, though in recent years he repeatedly tried to reconnect with her and their son on Facebook. Now the executive director of a birthing center in Albuquerque and a certified midwife, Eaves was making eggs one morning when she got a call originating in Southern California. “I had this odd feeling. As soon as [the caller] said she was from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, I said, ‘Oh God, Derek’s dead.’ She said, ‘How did you know?’”

JANELLE BIXLER-MAUCH, 56

She died on a bench in front of a Lake Forest laundromat; this photo shows the markings where the outside bench presumably stood before it was removed. Her cause of death was a blood clot. In an online tribute, a friend, Julie Glasser, wrote that Bixler-Mauch worked as a property manager for 20 years, had children and grandchildren, and possessed a feisty, lively nature as well as a love for her Catholic faith, her Chihuahua, and many interests, including crafts and tattoos. Glasser lamented her friend’s loss but said, “If I remove all the selfish thoughts I can say that I am happy that God had a better plan for you … You won’t suffer another day.”

ALBERTO GONZALEZ, 62

He died of coronary artery disease in front of the wall outside a Santa Ana mercado called Tia Market. A customer who stumbled onto Gonzalez that day ran into the store and alerted store employees, who then called 911. That wall had been a gathering place for homeless people because of a shade-bearing palm tree, which store owners had removed, leaving the stump still visible in the photo.

JONATHAN POWELL, 31

Powell was discovered next to a dumpster by a restaurant employee at Katie’s Munchies, having died from a heroin overdose in Westminster. Homeless people are known to sleep in the restaurant’s dumpster area, which is mostly enclosed by a cinder block partition. While older homeless people die of common natural ailments, “The 25- to 44-year-olds are being ravaged by drug overdose,” says Dr. Baggett.

KENNETH BAKER, 43

He was found in the bushes by a jogging trail in Newport Beach’s scenic Upper Newport Bay Nature Reserve, a quiet enclave surrounded by busy streets. Baker died of an infection of his heart valve. He also suffered from cellulitis in his toe, which is a painful bacterial infection that destroys tissue and is common among homeless people, among other foot disorders such as athletes’ foot, gangrene, trench foot, and unmended broken bones. Causes include diabetes, lack of hygiene, bad shoes, injuries, and constant walking or standing. A recent Canadian study showed that two-thirds of homeless people have foot problems at any one time.

‘My Son is Not a Personal Problem’: How Women Veterans Are Treated as Second-Class Citizens

Major Jas Boothe is strong. The first time I met her she scooped me up and carried me, like an old-timey groom walking their bride over the threshold. That’s a bold move with a new acquaintance, but she has plenty of reasons to be self-assured: She’s a veteran, a cancer survivor, and she raised her oldest son by herself, while she was homeless.

After she spent the mid-2000s struggling to navigate the Veterans Affairs (VA) system, and finding the resources for homeless women—and particularly mothers—lacking, Boothe founded Final Salute to support other veterans struggling to convince the military that their roles as mothers and as soldiers were inseparable.

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I spoke with Major Boothe about her life and the maze of challenges that women veterans face as members of the military as well as caregivers in their own families.

Kate Bahn: Can you tell us a brief overview of what you and your family went through when you were in the army and immediately after?

Jas Boothe: Life was definitely harder as a single mother in the army because it was used as ammunition against me. Everyone knows their body, and when I got cancer, I knew something was wrong. But I was told, “This is why women can’t hack it in the military,” “This is why women shouldn’t be in leadership positions,” “If you are not here training with your troops you look weak, they’re not going to respect you.” So I just said, “You know what, fine, I won’t go check on myself.” The military tells you suck it up and drive on.

It turns out I was dying. I had head, neck, and throat cancer. Good thing I was able to get to the doctor before I deployed, because there’s no telling how much worse it would have gotten a year or so later. But it’s things like that that let you know that we still have a very long way to go.

I was told, ‘This is why women can’t hack it in the military.’

There were other instances. When my 6-month-old got sick—he was born with asthma—and the day care called me and said, “Hey, can you come get him?” I said, “Of course!” But my supervisor at the time was a man, and it took me so long to explain to him why I had to go. He said, “You know what? You need to keep your personal problems in order.” And I said, “My son is not a personal problem. He’s a baby and he’s sick.” I had to explain it in a different way for him. I said, “So you know when your children get sick, your wife goes and picks them up and alleviates that concern from you? I am the wife. So I have to go.”

By the time I got to my son, since it took me so long, he was already in the ambulance headed to the hospital, and I just felt so bad. Then when I got to the hospital my supervisor called me. I thought “Oh, he’s calling to check to see how my son is doing.” But he was calling me to ask if I was going to be at work the next day.

People look on the surface of things in the military, like post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that. But we still have underlying issues of how you’re treated strictly because of your gender.

KB: After your cancer diagnosis, how did you balance your own care needs with your caregiving needs for your son? How did you navigate the mix of supports for veterans, the social safety net, help from your family?

JB: Well, I had to suffer. The cancer and Hurricane Katrina left me homeless and jobless. At that point, I did need extensive rehabilitation and medical care, but I also had a child that I needed to take care of who needed food, clothes, a roof over his head. And I knew that if I focused on my health like I needed to, I wouldn’t be employable because I would have so much follow-up care and so many appointments. So I just said, “You know what, I have to take care of my kid—that’s my 50-meter target.”

There is no balance, especially when you’re a mom, especially when you’re a wife, and definitely when you’re a soldier. And so I put my health to the side, which probably hurt me in the long run, but I felt that it was needed.

As women we sacrifice for our children, we sacrifice for our job, and sometimes we even sacrifice for our love life. Even when looking for supportive services, I was turned away from the VA because of my gender—I was told they didn’t have any supportive housing services for women and their children, and they told me to go get welfare and food stamps because I had an illegitimate child. If there was a male veteran who had a child when he wasn’t married, I can guarantee you they wouldn’t call his child an illegitimate child. They probably would just refer to him as “your son.”

It’s that subliminal way of thinking of how we see women in this country. When a male veteran has a need or issue it’s America’s fault, America has to help him. When a woman veteran has a need or issue, she failed herself: “What did you do to get yourself in that position?” It’s the same kind of rape [culture] mentality. “What were you doing over there at 3 o’clock in the morning?” or “Why were you wearing that short skirt?” We are always dressed down whenever something traumatic has happened to us. But I’ve noticed that a lot of male veterans are not re-stigmatized just based on their gender.

KB: What type of supports do you think would be helpful to other soldiers and veterans who are balancing their own care and needs as well as the care and needs of their families?

JB: I think people just need to realize that putting you in uniform does not make you a robot, it does not make you beyond need, it does not make you beyond care. And although we say we want to serve veterans equally and we need to serve veterans equally, we can’t. Men and women do not have the same make-up. [Most] men don’t need mammograms, men don’t need pap smears, men don’t need OB-GYNs. I say that because not every [VA] has an OB-GYN or a place where you can get mammograms or pap smears and things like that.

When a male veteran has an issue, it’s America’s fault. When a woman veteran has an issue, she failed herself.

KB: I would love for you to tell us about the organization you started, Final Salute. What is the goal, how did you start it, and how did you get it off the ground?

JB: I started Final Salute out of necessity. I didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I just would love to create a nonprofit.” I never saw myself creating a nonprofit. I saw myself as a soldier. But I also saw that women veterans were still being treated like second-class veterans, and no one was doing anything about it. Nobody was really even talking about it. I thought I was just that one soldier who slipped through the cracks. But there are tens of thousands of women veterans who are homeless. Women veterans are the fastest growing homeless population in America, and women veterans are also 250 percent more likely to commit suicide than any other women in American society.

Our mission is to provide homeless women veterans and children with vacant, suitable housing. And we have been able to raise $3 million to assist more than 36,000 women veterans. But there are still 55,000 homeless women veterans in America on any given day.

KB: How do you balance both helping women have financial security and independence while making sure they can also still be mothers and wives and family members?

JB: The key is keeping them with their children. The best thing you can do for a mother who’s struggling is keep her children with her. That way she can ensure that they’re safe, she can ensure that they’re taken care of. A lot of the VA shelters won’t do that: On my last count, I think out of 500 only 15 took in women with children. Some women are forced to give their children to friends and family members or even to the state because they can’t support them. Some women are forced to stay in domestic violence situations, because if they leave they won’t have anywhere to go with their child. Or some women sleep in their cars with their children. Homelessness isn’t just that guy on the park bench or in a tent city. Our primary means of survival are couch surfing, navigating from home to home until our welcome runs out so we can keep our children with us. We found that women thrive when their children are with them, and then once they know they are taking care of their responsibility as a mother, that allows them to focus on things like employment support or going back to school or getting that financial education and counseling they need.

We also noticed that [women need to] regain their tribes. When you are going through any situation, especially a hardship, tribe is important. In the military, we thrive in tribe because we are a unit; each member in the military becomes our family. When we watch people come into our transition home and regain that tribe and regain that sisterhood, we just see that drastic change in momentum in commitment from them.

KB: I really appreciate hearing about all your work again. It’s so inspiring, and I think it’s going to really hit a lot of people.

The Paul Ryan Guide to Pretending You Care About the Poor

Once, at a town hall in Wisconsin, someone asked known anti-poverty crusader Paul Ryan (R-WI) the following question:

“I know that you’re Catholic, as am I, and it seems to me that most of the Republicans in the Congress are not willing to stand with the poor and working class as evidenced in the recent debates about health care and the anticipated tax reform. So I’d like to ask you how you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the poor and dispossessed, as should we be.”

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It’s a tricky one, but if you want to simultaneously cut taxes for rich people and benefits for poor people, you need to be ready for it. So, just in time for the tax debate, I’ve written a handy step-by-step guide on how to convince your constituents that a help-the-rich, whack-the-poor agenda is really what’s best for everybody:

1. Say you share the same goals.

Let’s be honest: It sounds pretty bad to say that you want to take from the poor to give to the rich. So, don’t do it! The trick here is to convince people that you’re with them on the importance of helping the poor. You just disagree about “how to achieve that goal.”

Congratulations! You’ve just turned a profound moral question about whether we should help the poor or the rich into what appears to be a minor disagreement between ethically equivalent opinions.

2. Direct attention away from what it means to be poor.

Lots of people think poor people simply don’t have enough money to meet their families’ basic needs. You know better. Tell them what the poor really need is “upward mobility,” “economic growth,” and “equality of opportunity.” Not only do these airy concepts all sound really good—who could be against any of them?—they also let you pivot away from the obvious solution: giving people the money, food, health care, and other necessities they lack.

True, Ryan’s agenda doesn’t provide any of those things. But don’t worry! If you just repeat the lie that tax cuts for the rich spur economic growth, no one will even have time to dig into the intimate connection between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity.

You can’t pull off the enlightened nice-guy routine if you’re blaming poor people for their problems outright. You need to do it subtly. Instead of saying, “Poor people are poor because they’re lazy,” try saying, “We’ve got to change our approach … and always encourage work, never discourage work.” Never mind that most people who can work already do, or that wages are so low it’s possible (and quite common) to work full-time and still be in poverty. People are predisposed to believe that our success relative to those less fortunate is a result of our superior work ethic and talents, rather than a product of race, class, gender, and/or other forms of privilege and sheer dumb luck. The more you tap into that inclination, the more people will oppose helping those less fortunate and support imposing burdensome requirements on the Have Nots instead.

He’s fine with leaving those inconvenient details out, and you should be fine with doing so, too.

4. Choose unrepresentative examples and statistics.

Paul Ryan loves to tell people that “our poverty rates are about the same as they were when we started [the] War on Poverty,” which is more or less what the official poverty measure shows. Does it bother him that the official measure excludes the effects of the very programs he says aren’t working? Nope. It shouldn’t bother you, either. You also shouldn’t feel obligated to mention the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which shows that anti-poverty programs cut poverty nearly in half and have reduced poverty by 10 percentage points since the late 1960s. After all, Ryan doesn’t!

Similarly, Ryan likes to lament the case of “a single mom getting 24 grand in benefits with two kids who,” because of the way the safety net is designed, “will lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job.” The extraordinary rareness of this case doesn’t phase him, nor does the fact that his proposed remedies for this problem make life for that single mom—and thousands of others—much worse. He’s fine with leaving those inconvenient details out, and you should be fine with doing so, too.

5. Hammer “focus on outcomes” rhetoric.

Focusing on outcomes is popular in many fields, so this talking point—that “instead of measuring success based on how much money we spend or how many programs we create or how many people are on those programs … [we should] measure success in poverty on outcomes”—is very effective. The fact that nobody actually measures program effectiveness by how much money we spend or by the number of programs we create is irrelevant, as is the large and growing body of research showing that the safety net boosts the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. As long as you contend that we currently don’t focus on outcomes, you can make our anti-poverty programs seem misguided.

There will always be those who oppose funneling money from low- and middle-income Americans to the wealthy and corporations. But if you stick to these tried-and-true steps from Paul Ryan, before you know it, you’ll have convinced a constituency (and perhaps even yourself!) that helping the rich is actually about helping the poor. Or, at the very least, people will be too confused to know the difference.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on 34justice.com. It has been edited for length and content.